12th August 2011 – Sanctuary
Harry hadn't really wanted to visit the Order at their Sanctuary, except Harry had really wanted to visit the Order at Sanctuary, so when Hermione had suggested it – well, she hadn't suggested it so much as said it would happen – Harry had agreed.
He wanted to see Ron again. To speak with Remus, and Sirius, and half a dozen others. He even wanted to see Ginny again because, Merlin, it had been so long and he still loved her.
Yesterday had been her birthday, he remembered. Her birthday had been forever marred by the murder of Albus Dumbledore, and now again by the return of the Unspeakables.
He'd expected to feel guilty because a heavy layer of guilt followed him everywhere these days, but he hadn't expected to feel more guilty when he saw – and felt – just how small their Sanctuary was. Situated on the Cornish coast Harry thought it a picturesque sort of place. Pleasant enough for a family home, he supposed. But unlike Avalon, which was at least two hundred miles long and contained over a thousand people, Sanctuary was more like the mid-sized estate. As war criminals and blood traitors Harry didn't suppose most of the Order got a chance to leave very often.
"I know exactly how you feel," said Hermione softly. "I told you Ron's married Susan Bones, didn't I?"
Harry nodded. She had, and he couldn't see it himself – but then, he had been gone for nearly a decade. Lots of things had happened he wouldn't have foreseen, including things he himself had chosen to do.
Professor McGonagall met them, and Harry was glad it was her and not somebody – anybody, really – else because he could deal with Professor McGonagall. He'd already dealt with Professor McGonagall on Avalon.
"This way, please," said the elderly woman uncomfortably. "We have all—well," she said, pursing her lips. "This way, please."
So Harry followed her, and so did everyone else, and far too soon for Harry's liking they had all been seated in a communal meeting space with the rest of the Order – and he supposed, any non-Order adults who lived at Sanctuary. Harry wasn't exactly up to date regarding anything, really, but especially not the intricacies of domestic terror organisations.
They had called ahead to let everyone know they planned on coming, at least. Didn't help much with the way he felt totally, completely exposed though. Was Ginny staring at him? Could he really see Ron frowning? Hannah Abbott looked nervous, and Susan Bones – well, Susan Bones had never been a particularly bubbly or charming witch, but she sat between Ron and Katie Bell with a face like a Crup's arse.
That wasn't fair, he knew. They weren't the ones in the dog-house here. That privilege went to him, Hermione, Neville and Luna – the only four of them who had been 'lucky' enough to escape the war. He supposed it had been an escape, on balance, but that still didn't turn Avalon into a holiday. It hadn't been and never would be – the damned place was cursed, first by Morgana, then by Merlin, and finally by the sidhe. Avalon was beautiful and wild and powerful and lovely, but it was dangerous and cursed, too. Still, he knew that his time on Avalon would have been safer, better, than the same amount of time spent outside.
After all, the magic of five prophecies swirled around Britain, watching and waiting. At least three of which directly referenced him, Harry Potter, and suggested that this war couldn't be won until something drastic happened.
Which was a fucking terrible excuse.
"Mate," said Ron carefully after an extended and awkward silence. "I think you should explain. Hermione said some of it, but… frankly, Harry, we need more."
A chorus of nods and other signs of assent rippled through the room.
"All right," said Harry. He'd rehearsed what he was going to say. Once he wouldn't have, and he would have said the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong way, or done something similar which would have fucked up everything. Being stuck behind a fortress ward for nearly a decade had allowed him to develop something akin to patience, although Harry didn't quite feel comfortable calling it that because he didn't think it was proper patience.
After all, he only had to wait until the ward broke, right?
"Exactly ten years ago yesterday evening Dark Lady Valmira murdered Albus Dumbledore. Some of us weren't there at the time," he continued. "We were on holiday in Wales. For Ginny's… for your birthday," he said, turning to Ginny. "Happy birthday," he said, and he meant it, but then he pushed on having said it, even if he wished he hadn't. "The Unspeakables hadn't calculated that," he said bitterly. "They knew Dumbledore was going to die – they've got this thing called a Reality Mirror," he explained poorly, "but they thought they had more time."
"The Reality Mirror is a device created by Unspeakable Thomas," added Luna softly. "It allows us to see into other realities and extrapolate back to our own. It is possible to control the degree of closeness to our own reality in the observed reality, but the Unspeakables realised fairly quickly that our reality is experiencing a vastly more complex problem than most other realities in our sphere."
"We're a bit of an outlier in that regard," said Hermione. "There are more outlandish, more unusual, realities of course – but the Unspeakables have a concept they call 'the parsimonious cosmic plurality', which basically means that there is are infinite subsections of infinity, of reality, wherein there is a high degree of similarity between a given number of realities. Only within our larger sphere can we make useful extrapolations or hypothesise based on events."
"What she means," said Neville, "is that there's a universe out there where I'm the Boy Who Lived, and that one is relevant to us a bit. But there's a universe out there where there's never been a Boy Who Lives, and that's still slightly relevant to us. But the universe where everyone's a dragon probably isn't useful to us." He paused. "Sorry, Hermione, but if I hadn't interrupted you you'd have started talking about 'twelfth-dimensional thought constructs' and we'd be here until the cosmos turns to dust."
"So there's, like, another me out there?" asked Ron, frowning. "Where?"
Harry couldn't answer that, but Hermione looked as if she were about to try – except Luna answered first.
"The premise of your question is meaningless, Ronald," she said. "It is a continuum of reality, a spectrum of Ron Weasleys. You are you and you are here, but Ron Weasley is Ron Weasley somewhere else." She paused. "I always thought the cosmos was shaped like a dirigible plum, but now I think it's more like a ball made out of thin wooden sticks."
"Right," said Ron, echoing what Harry felt. He'd never been able to wrap his head around Luna's 'the shape of infinity' idea, and he expected he never would be able to. Why was the multiverse shaped like a ball made out of sticks?
"Yeah, anyway," said Harry. "I spent a lot of time looking in the Reality Mirror. I saw this one reality where V—the Dark Lord came back in 1994, and we'd defeated him by 1997."
"What was different?" whispered Minerva.
"He was insane," said Harry. "Completely, utterly, insane. He didn't have an army like he did here, just about twenty or so Death Eaters. No Valmira, not even a figure comparable to her. Dumbledore still died – in 1996 – but was killed by Snape on Dumbledore's orders." He didn't wait for them to respond or even affirm they'd heard him. "Professor Dumbledore dies in almost every reality we've been able to access, especially in those closest to our own. That's why the Unspeakables acted so quickly after Dumbledore's death – within six months they acted to prevent an escalation of the war, which always happens after Dumbledore dies. It's like he's the tipping point."
"For every reality where we won," said Neville, "there are at least two where we didn't."
"The war escalated regardless," responded Remus, "and we live in its consequences."
Harry shook his head.
"I'm sorry, I was using escalated the way the Unspeakables use it… I meant that after Dumbledore dies, the war becomes charged with the magic of prophecy. I think there weren't as many prophecies in the other realities."
"It would certainly make sense," interjected Hermione. "There are five prophecies regarding this current conflict."
"There are only really two, if you see two of them as a single prophecy and three of them as another," disagreed Luna.
"My point was that there are rather a lot of things being dictated or suggested by Fate," said Hermione, "not that it is difficult to tell whether we're dealing with five separate prophecies or two superprophecies."
"And that's why you all got to sit behind your fortress ward, is that it?" said Ginny, speaking for the first time. "Because the Unspeakables were worried you might break, and their prophecies would mean nothing?"
Harry shrugged.
"Honestly, that's why they did it. I don't think what they did was okay, really I don't," said Harry, because he didn't. He really, really didn't. What the Unspeakables had done was cruel and horrible and absolutely not their choice to make, but it was what they had done. He couldn't change the past, and the Unspeakables had confirmed it would be impossible even to slightly change their actions through Time-Turners because they'd set the operation in motions months before even the most powerful Time-Turner could manage.
"I just don't know what I can do about that now. I was angry at them for so long. I refused to help them. Then I helped them, but only because it wasn't just for me, it was for the Muggleborns they'd kidnapped too."
He paused, sure of what to say but unsure whether he should actually say it.
"We were kidnapped and we made the best of it," said Neville. "There really isn't any way to break a time-locked fortress ward. It's really old magic. It's what Morag Muir used to defend Diagon Alley against the Unseelie Court, because the ritual can only break it from inside the ward."
"I know about time-locked fortress wards," said Hannah Abbott. "My mother's mother was a Muir, and she passed down a really old diary," she said slowly. "One of the things it mentions are time-locked fortress wards." She said it warily, as if she didn't really want to give credence to the idea but had to, because she knew it could be true.
Harry didn't blame her, or any of the others, for their standoffishness. He'd be standoffish with him too.
"But you want us to start fighting again, don't you?" said Susan. "When he's won, the world is different now…"
"You can't be happy with this," snapped Hermione. "We're sorry, but none of this is our fault!"
"It's not ours either!" snapped Susan in return. "Of course we're not fucking happy, I mean, Circe's festering cunt, Hermione! Look around you."
"I think what Susan meant to say is that we've adapted to our situation," said Remus diplomatically.
"I meant what I said, thanks," said Susan dully, but Harry saw Ron grasp her hand firmly.
"She's right," said Harry, and then everyone turned to stare at him. "Both of them, I mean. Hermione's right that this isn't our fault, and Susan's right it isn't yours. We don't have any right to ask you to start fighting again. The war is over and we lost, even if some of us didn't get to fight in it." He sounded a bit defeatist here, which wasn't really what he wanted to achieve, but he pushed on regardless. "None of you have to fight. We're not even here to ask you to do that anyway, we're here because there are people here we consider family."
He looked each and every member of the Order in the room directly in the eyes. All the Weasleys, including Ginny, and even Molly and Arthur, who'd remained silent the entire time, merely watching. The remnants of the Order's old guard, and then the new guard. Every single person in the room, except for Neville, Luna and Hermione.
"But I have to fight. I literally can't not fight him. Everyone here knows the prophecy. Except it's not as simple as that. Neville and Luna and Hermione – they all need to fight too, because like we said, there's more than one prophecy. It's all about choices, in the end."
"You remember what we said when Dumbledore told you that he might come back?" said Ron. "Because I meant it then, and I still mean it now." He turned to look at Susan. "I made a promise. I made a promise ages ago, but I was always taught to remember my promises."
"That's the man I raised," said Arthur quietly from the back of the room, just loud enough for the sound to carry.
"Thanks, mate," said Harry. "I really mean it. I—look, we have a plan. The four of us, and the Unspeakables, and we think we can do it. We…" he floundered.
Luckily for him, Luna picked up where couldn't finish, opening her mouth to sing words etched upon Harry's mind.
"'Out of the darkness comes a light and a song.
A song to be sung, a choice to be chosen.
In the ashes of what has gone before
You can build something better.
The Mother of All Evil has come unrelenting.
The World-Snake will devour all that is good.
When everything has been lost, and hope has gone,
It will be time. The one with the power will rise.
The Lioness will be forged.
The Singer of Songs will sing.
The Warrior and the Maiden will fight again,
Harder and stronger than ever before.
Forces best left sleeping will be woken,
And a price will be paid.
A place will be made for the Breaker of Chains,
Should He choose to fill it.
From a song will come revolution,
And from revolution, peace.'"
Luna smiled, and Hermione rolled her eyes.
"So dramatic, honestly," muttered Hermione. "That's the Prophecy of a Mad Muggle – although I think he was actually an uncontacted, untrained Muggleborn Seer. That's the prophecy the Unspeakables based their decision making on, largely. 'When everything has been lost, and hope has gone, it will be time.'" she quoted. "But that can only happen after the World-Snake – the Dark Lord – has devoured 'all that is good'. I'm not saying I agree with what the Unspeakables did, but that prophecy is a large part of the reason why they did it."
The small room exploded into the most sedate and contained form of chaos Harry had ever seen. Nobody moved, and everyone spoke only in comically loud whispers.
"What's the 'price'?" Harry heard Fred say.
"Has to be death," replied George. "That's always the price."
"'The one with the power' is obviously Harry," said Katie Bell.
"But who is 'the Breaker of Chains'?" said Susan, frowning and then looking at Ron carefully.
"'In the ashes of what has gone before you can build something better,'" muttered Arthur. "Certainly sounds uplifting, doesn't it?"
Harry realised then that he didn't really care what anyone else was thinking. No, that was unfair – he did, but not that much. Cautiously he looked at Molly, who hadn't said anything at all thus far, and that was unusual.
She seemed to be aware of his thoughts, however, because she cleared her throat to speak and suddenly, everyone stopped talking to listen to her.
"Family stands by family," said Molly. "Family doesn't step away when things get difficult. Family doesn't stop being family just because somebody's done something we don't like or made choices we think aren't the right ones. And family certainly doesn't blame family for circumstances outside of a person's control." She peered at Harry then. "We've had a tough time of it, on the outside," she said. "We've seen our friends and family members die fighting him. Merlin only knows how many people I've seen go down fighting that monster of a man." Arthur placed his hand firmly around Molly's. "But that's why I still believe he needs to be stopped. Not one, not two, but three generations of wizards and witches have lost family to that man."
"You might not be mine by blood and birth and magic, Harry Potter, but I'll cut down anyone who says you're not my son just as much as Ron or any of them."
Her fierce look told Harry that she meant it, and Harry believed she could do it, too.
That dissipated a lot of the tension in the room, although not all of it.
"I can't speak for the whole of the Order," continued Molly, "but you've – you've all – got my support," she said firmly. "
"And mine," said Arthur.
"Well I already said, didn't I?" said Ron.
The mood of the room had changed. Harry could feel that. Most people in the room were Weasleys or married to Weasleys, after all, and the others, well – they each had their own motives for joining the Order in the first place, but those generally aligned.
"Well I never thought we should have stopped fighting in the first place," asserted Professor McGonagall.
"What's actually changed?" said Susan. "Nothing's changed, as far as I can see, except fifty-odd people and Harry fucking Potter have come out of hiding. What's fifty Unspeakables compared with hundreds of Death Eaters? We aren't talking First War levels here, Potter. We're not even talking War for Pureblood Freedom levels of Death Eater, and that was fucking enough. The ranks have swollen. When we were at school, just after the First War, the Ministry conducted a census. There were twenty thousand witches and wizards in Britain, not including the ten in Ireland, when we were all at school. Before him, before this started all, the last Ministry census counted fifty-thousand, two hundred and nine wizards or witches in Britain and Ireland. Between when we graduated and when he came back, a lot of the people who weren't killed but fled Britain came back to it and brought their families with them."
Harry was vaguely aware that yes, that was how many witches and wizards there were in Britain and Ireland, and that a significant proportion of these at least sympathised with Voldemort. But what did that have to do with the cost of a Chocolate Frog?
"We're not sure how many wizards there are anymore," said Fred, "Lots of people died, but then the Ministry mandated four courses of fertility potion treatment to all married women. He brought over at least five hundred Death Eater and their families. Now he has ten thousand Death Eaters."
"That's ridiculous," said Hermione. "That's one-fifth of the population. One in five people in the British Isles is a Death Eater…"
"Not quite," said Remus. "There has been, ah, significant population growth – what the Dark Lord has done here, he and his Lady did in parts of Europe before they came here. The deaths our community has experienced have been mitigated, in terms of population growth, by the waves of immigration brought about by Death Eaters and sympathisers from all over Europe. We've become a breeding ground of radicalisation, where young men and women from all across the continent can come. Some of them are starting to go back home, and the foreign Ministries are starting to get rather cross."
"So nothing has changed except to get worse," said Susan. "His armies are bigger than ever before. More of the population supports the regime than ever before. The rest of the world has given up on us fixing this problem. The problem is so big that we're fucking exporting it to Europe."
"And everyone sits in Wizengamot and congratulates each other," said George bitterly. "Remember when the birth-rate was at its highest in three centuries? From their reaction you'd think being dosed up on fertility potions popping out Death Eater kids is better than Christmas."
"We've got hope," said Luna. "This time, we have hope. We have a plan. We know the contents of the prophecies. They don't. We can do this. The universe literally gave us a framework for a plan."
"We're not just blindly stumbling around in the dark," said Hermione. "We've worked with the Unspeakables with this. We won't force you to do anything you don't agree to do."
"But we will accept any help," said Harry, grinning. Despite Sorrowful Susan and her gloomy outlook – which Harry understood, and he supposed if Ron married her she couldn't be too bad – he was happy. He felt like he was home again, and wasn't that weird, since he'd never even been to Cornwall before?
The conference had broken up into smaller groups after a little while, as Ron dragged Susan aside to explain his reasoning to her, and Fred and Katie moved off to talk. Even Neville left to catch up with Hannah, who he had been waiting for for nearly a decade. Luna found something to distract her, and Hermione was speaking with Professor McGonagall.
Harry just stood around awkwardly until he was enveloped into a massive hug by Molly.
"I can't… we don't want you to think we're happy with you all being somewhere else for so long," said Molly when the hug was over. "But the Unspeakables were always—there have always been so many stories," she said. "So we do understand."
"Of course we do," said Arthur.
Harry relaxed a bit.
"It's… the only way we could have broken the ward is to take blood from a child, forcefully; flesh from a mother, knowingly given; and hair from a sidhe, taken under the light of the moon." He knew the terms of the fortress ward as well as he knew his own name. "That's the only way. I spent so long looking for another way out. It took me three years to give up, in the end. It's not even Dark magic," he said. "It's ancient Light magic. I checked."
Molly frowned, but Harry wasn't entirely sure why.
"Sometimes that's worse," said Arthur darkly. "Dark magic and Dark wizards aren't inherently evil," he said. "We know that. Weasleys have never been big on Dark magic, don't get me wrong, but there's more to it than good and evil. But sometimes the ancient Light wizards were even worse – Dark can mean wildness, which can be beautiful and not at all evil. Light can mean order, which is necessary and good, but… some of the ancient Light spells used to promote order would be classified Dark if they were created today."
Harry knew that, more or less. Magic was magic, and wizards had crafted a series of classifications around that magic. There were many and overlapping categories and classifications applied to magic, but probably the largest and broadest categories were 'Light' or 'Dark' – and a category formed through exclusivity, 'Neutral'. Dark magic often involved emotion, whether positive or negative. Magic embodying an aspect of Darkness – wildness, chaos, domination, emotion – could usually be called Dark magic, although a lot of more common spells which should be called Dark weren't, largely due to prejudice against Dark magic and Dark magic users.
The fortress ward was definitely not Dark magic. It required no emotion – not even love, which Harry thought was a component necessary for such a powerful protective effect – and could be considered a most ancient kind of Light magic. Lightness – order, freedom, choice, rationality – had been interpreted to mean many different things, but the fortress ward was definitely ancient Light magic.
The process of its creation fulfilled the aspect of choice, because it required a willing sacrifice. It embodied the aspect of order, which also sometimes meant safety or protection, but also unity of the group. It even embodied the aspect of freedom and choice together, since the decision to favour protection and safety over freedom represented a sacrifice of liberty.
He still didn't like it. He'd given up caring whether magic was Light or Dark magic several years ago, when he'd realised that Dark magic was only more dangerous because intention mattered. You needed to want to hurt, to kill, to maim for a lot of the spells to work – but the reason why you wanted to was also a factor. Dark magic was easy to use often because of magical feedback that happened through its common use of emotion in magic.
Something similar to Dark magic addiction happened to people who overused Cheering Charms, but it was called something else because 'Cheering Charms aren't Dark magic'.
"Yeah, the fortress ward is probably one of those. It's extremely powerful because it requires a willing human sacrifice. Truly willing, and not coerced in any kind of way. Hermione said it was interesting."
"Well, she would say that, wouldn't she?" said Molly, and then quickly changed the subject. "Arthur, we should go check on the little ones… Don't you dare go anywhere, Harry Potter!" she said sternly. "You are all staying for dinner this evening."
And then both of the elder Weasleys left, and Harry was again alone.
Except not really alone, because Ginny had been watching him the whole time, hadn't she? Not that she'd got up from where she sat until… until now.
Fuck. He was going to have to talk to her, wasn't he? For a Gryffindor, a reckless fool, Harry Potter was a coward.
"I didn't wait for you, you know," said Ginny quietly, too quiet for the noise to carry.
"I didn't either," he decided to say, because that was the truth and—well. He hadn't expected her to just jump right out and say it.
"Hannah waited for Neville, but… I didn't think you'd mind," said Ginny. "I wouldn't have."
"No, you're right. It's not that I stopped loving you, it's that…"
"I was ten years away. You could have waited, you know. I don't expect you to have done, but… you could have." She left unspoken that, if he could have waited, so could she. It wasn't as if she thought he was dead. Although… the Unspeakables hadn't exactly proclaimed their allegiances from the rooftops, had they? He could have been killed by them, even as the people of Britain thought it had been Voldemort.
"Yeah."
"It was Dean Thomas," she said. Harry wasn't too surprised by that. "He's dead."
"I'm sorry."
He was. He was always fucking sorry. She didn't say it wasn't his fault. That was half the problem, wasn't it?
"So what do you plan to do now?"
"I'm going to bring him down, Gin," he said. "Him and his wife, and then we're going to gut the Ministry and build a new one. You heard the prophecy. We're going to do that. Build something better."
"I thought you didn't like Divinations," she said.
"I don't. It's bullshit. But prophecy is real, and I've seen what the Dark Lord has done in other realities. I've seen how they've won, too. One reality faced a much more powerful, but much more mad, version of him. The Harry in that reality was a Slytherin, if you can believe that. He managed to build a great world out of his fight with—the Dark Lord. It's been twelve years since they won, and sometimes I just—I watch to see what happens next."
"You really do believe in the prophecies. All of them. What do the others say?"
"My whole life is a prophecy, Gin. All of it. Since before I was born, even," he said. "And the Unspeakables have been working with these prophecies for a while. One of them is two thousand years old, older even than Hogwarts. It's still about now. This war is important."
No doubt sensing that Harry didn't want to talk about the other prophecies – they weren't all about him anyway, and one new prophecy was enough to talk about for now – Ginny changed the topic slightly.
"Where exactly were you? Hermione didn't say."
"The locals call it Ynys Afal, which means 'apple island'. You'd know it as Avalon."
"The Avalon? But it's been gone for centuries, everyone thought the sidhe took it back to the Otherworld!"
"Nope. After the Tylwyth Teg used it to flee Morag Muir the humans – the daughters of Morgana, if you believe the legend – sealed off the island and kept it hidden ever since. Hermione said the daughters of Morgana couldn't have done it because Morgana died at least five hundred years before it happened, but I don't think it's that important, really."
That wasn't a legend on Avalon, of course. It was local history. But they hadn't really written any of it down at the time, so Harry wasn't sure they were exactly right.
"It's quite dangerous," he added. "When the sidhe left Britain for the Otherworld they took all their wildness and beauty and stuff with them, leaving the banshees and boggarts and stuff behind. They left some Darker, sturdier stuff too – but it all got trapped on Avalon. The locals believe they're meant to keep the creatures on Avalon, but I think they're just rationalising so they don't feel so bad about it."
"What sort of Darker stuff?"
Harry wrinkled his nose.
"They don't really have names, they're not specific kinds of thing. Some of them are really old, older than Stonehenge even. They're evil, just… evil. It's why we all use Dark curses so much," Harry said. Dark curses were the only things capable of stalling some of the creatures on Avalon, and often the only things capable of hurting skilled, sane, Death Eaters, too. Harry had made something of a study of war, in the last decade. This particular conflict especially. "Nothing else even hits them."
"And people have just lived there for a thousand years?" said Ginny incredulously.
"It's not all the time," said Harry. "Usually only at defined intervals, when the space between our world and the Otherworld – they're stuck in the gap, I think – gets closer."
"Hallowe'en?" guessed Ginny.
He nodded.
"That's a big one."
Their appearance generally coincided with important celestial events and magical occurrences of the old pagan calendars. One could literally plan a calendar around it.
Harry supposed talking with Ginny again wasn't so bad after all.
Neville could have explained to her how difficult it had been to wait for her, because it had been. It had been incredibly difficult. He'd flirted and danced, even kissed, some girls on Avalon, but none of them had been Hannah.
He'd been prepared for the eventuality that Hannah wouldn't wait for him. He'd seen Harry not wait for Ginny, Hermione not wait for Ron – and he wasn't stupid, not even then. Just a bit naïve.
Hannah had waited for him though, just like he'd waited for her, and it just felt right. She understand how difficult it had been because she had done it too. They hadn't even said much of anything to each other anyway, just sat and held each other's hands and stared. Not a whole lot of conversation going on, really.
Which wasn't to say they hadn't communicated because they had. He understood that Hannah still loved him – or at least, the Neville he had been – and Neville still loved her, or the Hannah she had been. Even if they were different people now, they were different people who still loved each other. Or at least a version of each other, and that was a start.
It was more than a lot of people had, he supposed.
"Everything is different now, isn't it?" said Hannah suddenly. "I know you've got your plans, and I'm willing to listen to them, but you all need to know things about what the world is like now. What's different and what's the same, what's possible and what isn't possible. Society changed while you were away," she said.
Neville thought that was a bit of an understatement, but then – Hannah had never been one to shy away from a bit of hard work, and if understating the problem made it seem easier to tackle, who was Neville to judge? He'd spent years in Hogwarts assuming everything was much more difficult than it actually was and he'd got nowhere because it seemed too big to even start.
Then Hannah kissed him, and didn't stop until he kissed her back.
"I love you, Neville Longbottom. But don't you ever do that to me again, do you hear? If you're not staying here with me, I'm coming wherever it is the Unspeakables have had you."
Neville could have said it was too dangerous, or that it was meant to be secret, or one of any number of things, really.
But he didn't want to, so instead he kissed her again, and again, and again, and then agreed.
Of course it had been Hermione who had made the decision to speak with Ron and Susan, and not the other way around, because Hermione had always been the adult in her relationship with Ron, and despite a decade of growth, old habits were hard to kick when confronted with figures from the past.
So she had gone to speak with them after she was sure enough time had passed for them to sort out – at least a little bit – whatever it was that was going on between them. Hermione supposed it might be rather a lot, given the circumstances, but given the circumstances she had rather a lot she wanted to say, too.
"I wanted to congratulate you on your wedding," she said as sincerely as she possibly could. She did mean it, even if it hurt her to. She'd loved Ron – she was happy he was happy, that he hadn't been alone for ten years. Merlin only knew how lonely Hermione had felt at times – the other half of the time she'd felt guilty for not being lonely.
She understood. She wanted them to know that she understood, even if she didn't see why in the world Ron would end up with Susan Bones. That was another side of war, she supposed.
"Thank you," said Susan primly.
"There isn't any hard feeling," she continued. "I didn't—well, I didn't get married of course, but I didn't wait for you, either."
She watched Ron carefully and saw that the fact hurt him, and it hurt him even though he knew it was unfair.
Good, she thought.
"That's only fair," said Ron weakly. "I'm—we're happy, and that's what matters, right?" he said, and looked to Susan for confirmation. "We're happy, and we weren't before."
"We have to fight for happiness these days," said Susan. "That's about all I have energy to fight for, now. We've got kids."
"Someone did mention," Hermione decided to say. Weirdly, that made it better for her – she didn't want children, not yet. There was still work to be done, and Merlin – she was only thirty years old! The Ministry of Divine Health had published recent statistics on fertility – they'd got that from the scrying pool centred on the Daily Prophet press office – which suggested witches remained fertile even up to the age of seventy, depending on magical strength.
She had time for babies. What she needed now was to finish the war and not end up dead, and then she could think about babies.
"How many?" she asked.
"There's Edgar and Fabian," said Ron, "the twins. They're five now, I think."
"Nearly six, Ron. I had Amelia two years ago, but that's it for now," said Susan, sounding warmer and happier than Hermione had heard her yet.
Maybe there was something in babies, although she wasn't about to test that hypothesis quite yet.
12th August 2011 – Emergency Wizengamot Legislative Chamber, Ministry of Magic
Sirius Black had never, not once in all his years alive, thought he'd ever see the inside of the Wizengamot chambers again, at least not as a free man. But then the War for Pureblood Freedom was over and lost, and unlike certain blood traitors – most notably, the Weasley family – he could at least claim amnesty due to his breeding, social standing, and Dark pedigree.
He hadn't wanted to. He'd wanted to soldier on and continue the war, this time staging attacks against Voldemort and the Death Eaters as terrorists, freedom fighters. At first the others had agreed, but as they became increasingly pushed out of society – whilst he was courted by the newly legitimised Death Eaters on the basis of his blood.
He supposed it made a queer sort of sense. Pureblood ideology was focused so much on blood that it was to its own detriment, as Sirius's blood status and Dark pedigree mattered more than his individual actions in fighting against the Death Eaters.
After all, the war was over now. The Purebloods (capital P, which meant 'the worthy') had won. Blood-status and magical history mattered now, and mattered in all of the old ways again.
Sirius Black could not be denied a seat in the legislative chamber of Wizengamot – not the court, but then, he had a seat on that, too – because he headed the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. The system of magical inheritance which determined that would not allow any female member of the house to inherit over a living, male direct heir. Sirius lived, and although he thought that Voldemort could kill him if he so desired, the Dark Lord didn't much care about Pureblood politics.
Not now that he'd won, at any rate. He'd been remarkably quiet for the last decade, and that scared Sirius.
In Voldemort's negligence the people of Britain had stepped in to provide what he could not, and a series of ghastly reforms had been voted through Wizengamot each time. Much of the population had been more or less enslaved, reduced to second-class citizenship – not even allowed wands, in many cases.
Unmarried Muggleborns were rounded up and shipped off to so-called 'new communities', and everyone knew what those actually were. Everyone with half a brain of course, which discounted half of Wizengamot right off the bat.
Wizengamot had convened an emergency legislative session.
'Colour me surprised', Sirius had remarked to Astoria Greengrass when she had told him. He'd played his rescue of her brilliantly, he thought. Swooping in like a dashing, Pureblood hero to defend her against the vile mudblood.
All complete bollocks, but then, Sirius always had had a way of charming ladies.
He wondered exactly how Lucius Malfoy would spin this. The man hadn't arrived yet. He'd wait until the chamber was filled – and unlike regular sessions, the chamber would overflow into standing room only – until he arrived.
No doubt fresh from a briefing with Voldemort, who'd gone and set himself up as 'King of Wizarding Britain'. As if wizards believed in monarchy! It had been accepted by many Dark Purebloods though precisely because it allowed them to occupy the place of the aristocracy, the rightful stewards and wardens of the King's realm.
Not that anyone in public actually referred to a King or a Queen – it was distasteful, and not really official to boot, so could even be lethal if overheard by the right people.
And the right people were everywhere these days. Most of the work he did for the Order was extremely deep cover, and largely only concerned politicking and trafficking gossip. Hardly the fight he remembered, but then – they lived in a different world now, a world his great-grandfather would have been proud to live in.
And prepared to live in, too. Old cultural rules had been reinstated. The 'creeping Christianisation' of Wizarding Britain had been halted, with Christmas banned in Hogwarts in favour of older, more 'magical' celebrations. Some nutters had even attempted to change from a Christian-based calendar to an older form, and that was nuts in and of itself. Half the world used Muggle Christian dates, even other wizards. Sirius didn't even care for the idea that there had been a 'creeping Christianisation' of wizards in the first place, since it wasn't like wizards had suddenly started believing in the Muggle God.
Why would they, when Jesus had been a documented and well-attested powerful wizard in the vein of Merlin? Bloke probably smoked some things he shouldn't have, but that didn't make him the 'Son of God', or whatever it was Muggles thought.
'There is no God but magic', wasn't that was his grandmother used to say? Of course, she'd also said that Muggle hunting should be legal and the only good mudblood was a dead mudblood.
Eventually Malfoy entered the chamber, and the low buzz of the idiots filling the benches stopped immediately.
"Britain has last night been the subject of a most brutal and vicious terrorist attack," he began. "Late yesterday evening a series of raids were carried out by an as-yet unknown terrorist organisation claiming to represent the Unspeakables. I have drafted emergency legislation which aims to prevent domestic travel to Ireland, which is a current warzone. We shall erect wards preventing portkey, Floo and Apparition to the island. Intelligence has indicated that the threat comes from the Irish Court, no doubt a response to our recent declaration of war."
That was rich. The Irish Court were pissing themselves. They'd asked the French to help them, but the French refused to get involved. The Germans were staying out of it all, since a similar sort of feeling existed in Germany to the one in Britain. At least in some circles… which were admittedly mostly in Britain at the moment, learning how to best aide the movements in their own countries.
He was scared, and he was a half-mad Gryffindor with basically nothing to lose, not anymore. Everything that could be taken had been, up to and including his good conscience. He did what he could, now, but that amounted to bailing water out of a sinking rowboat in the middle of the ocean.
"Moves have been made to destabilise the Centenary Ward protecting Tara from direct assault," continued Malfoy. "We expect to bring down the ward within weeks. In the meanwhile we shall focus our attention on the outlying towns and settlements."
Voldemort hadn't even had to work hard to raise positive sentiments about the war in Britain. Ever since 1707, when the Irish Court voted against unification with the British Ministry, relations between the two countries had been strained. Not hostile, but strained. With the wave of support Dark Pureblood ideology had received in Britain – and other ideologies besides – war was almost inevitable. If it hadn't been a government sanctioned war it would have been a youth war, an unofficial war waged that would have eventually resulted in the collapse of the Irish Court.
The Ministry would have swooped in to pick up the pieces, of course.
But the mood in Britain had been angling towards war for a while, since there were too many new additions to society (in the form of the Death Eaters), and too many changes. If not Ireland, where? Civil war in Britain would have been just as bad, but quickly stamped out by the Dark Lord and Lady. Sirius understood why they had been keen to move the Death Eaters to war again, since so many of them were primarily warriors now, not the elite group Voldemort had crafted in his early days.
Too many people to rule, that was the problem, especially without a distraction from everything horrible going on. Most people in Britain who mattered – the more prestigious halfbloods, the Purebloods not considered blood traitors, and even some talented Muggleborns – didn't have a difficult life, didn't have anything particularly bad to worry about. There were stories, and of course Voldemort was an evil man, but they were safe, too.
Only the people on the margins of society really cared and worried about the things they heard.
"Are we sure it wasn't the Unspeakables?" dared one brave Wizengamot member. Sirius recognised her as Charity Burbage, former Hogwarts professor and now member of the Mudblood Integrationist wing of Wizengamot voters. She walked a dangerous line most days, although the Dark Lord preferred – now that he was the highest authority – to work within the laws he had said.
Sirius though he got a perverse kind of pleasure from playing along with rules he knew he could break at any time. Dissent was tolerated, but probably only because the mainstream position was so secure.
Burbage and others like her, even Sirius really, were fringe politicians. People who could say whatever they liked – within reason – because they were Pureblood, rich, and willing to say it. Voldemort had nothing to fear and so, feared nothing.
"A fringe group, perhaps," offered Malfoy, "no doubt using some foul necromancy to produce a simulacrum of the late Potter boy. But certainly with no connection to the Ministry."
Sirius wondered when someone would bring that up. He couldn't, not with his position being as it was. He would have to assert, of course, that his godson was dead – he had mourned, but accepted the loss, publicly. Thankfully it had been Malfoy himself.
Questions would be asked all over Britain soon enough about whether Harry Potter had really died, and exactly what last night had meant. That was obviously an intended consequence of whatever it was the Unspeakables had planned.
He'd hoped for years Harry would come back, with or without the Unspeakables, and not because he wanted him to fight in some damned war. He could live with the new regime – he'd proven that by doing it – but he wanted his godson back.
"The damage in Hogsmeade alone will require compensation to the victims of course," said Melodia Honeyduke, "not to mention the cost of Obliviations, if rumours regarding the Muggle disturbances last night prove true. How does the Ministry intend to pay for this?"
"The Business Faction will not agree to any tax increases during this session!" interrupted Apollonius Dredge, owner of Dredge Plumbing Solutions, the premier provider of magical plumbing in Britain. Sirius snorted.
Of course he wouldn't support a tax rise, since those tended to overwhelmingly affect business and mercantile rather than Pureblood dynastic wealth.
And of course that was the important thing right now, not the return of a dead man or a rogue government department, or the many victories they had won over the regime the night before. Not those things.
Never those things.
"The affair does raise the question of allowing some upstanding mudbloods in the new communities the use of wands, of course," Sirius drawled, deciding that if the Business Faction could bring up taxes, he could bring up the issue of wand access again. "For protection against terrorists."
"Absolutely out of the question!" roared Elphinstone MacNair, almost foaming at the mouth at the very prospect of such a wildly outlandish thing that would have been commonplace only six years ago. "To do so would undermine the very stability of this government and society!"
Sirius thought that was rather the point, but conceded not everyone shared his opinion that that would, in fact, be a good thing. Which said a lot about the company he kept these days, and a lot about the company that was even there to be kept in the first place.
He glanced down at Malfoy, still stood at the centre of the circular chamber. He never displayed much of a reaction to anything that was said in the chamber. It would be poor form. But Sirius knew what he thought anyway, since he knew how the man thought. It was how Sirius had been taught to think, once, and how half of the less whiny and petulant Dark Purebloods in Britain thought.
Non Talbot stood up and said something no doubt intelligent and articulate, and of extreme relevance to the matter at hand, but she did so in Welsh, and so nobody in the chamber understood a word that she had said. Sirius hadn't, anyway, but that was par for the course with Non – she did this every single time she attended a session, and seemed well enough able to understand English.
Sirius thought she was making some sort of political point, but nobody from society interacted with the Talbot family generally, and so nobody knew what she wanted or even stood for. But they were Purebloods and held an ancestral seat at Wizengamot, and that was the important thing.
The chamber moved on from her interruption, as it always did, and back to more mundane – but still fairly nuts – matters.
"What my Noble and Most Ancient Friend has suggested is impossible, given the legislative powers of this session to alter the Mudblood Wand Act of 2006. If my Noble Friend would like to address this matter again he should do so at the 2026 session."
The wand issue was locked in law until 2026, the session after next. Sirius knew that, and Malfoy knew that Sirius knew that, but Sirius had to try anyway. It was all part of the game – he was a Pureblood, but believed some mudbloods could be integrated. Some had been already, although it wasn't talked about much.
Some mudbloods were even rescued from their family homes and given to good wizarding parents, and almost nobody spoke about that. Those children didn't exist, thank you very much.
"We will be voting on the matter of cessation of travel to Ireland until the conflict has ended," said Malfoy, gaining control over the room. "We will discuss, after the vote, methods to curb the rise of domestic terrorism."
Lovely agenda, thought Sirius. Introduction of authoritarian and draconian measures – which the Purebloods had hated coming from the Ministry not a decade before – followed by a swift curtailment of domestic freedoms and rights. But only for the riff-raff, of course.
He wasn't even surprised when the vote passed through with only four against, and nineteen abstentions.
12th August 2011 - Hogwarts
Severus Snape danced a dance so delicate and intricate most who danced it would die due to their own missteps. He had been a spy for more of his life than he hadn't been. He had been a spy longer than he had been a Death Eater, and he suspected even if this affair ended, he would still not truly belong to any one side.
He had no side but his own, in many ways. In many others he was on Dumbledore's side, or he had been when that had been possible. Was he on Potter's side?
Severus really couldn't say, not yet.
He was most assuredly not on the Dark Lord's side, despite what his master may have thought. Severus had committed to his course of action a long time ago, first out of foolish love and then out of a desire to survive. That had changed into something else, because the Dark Lord was not a positive force in the world.
Despite saying and professing to believe in things dear to Severus – history, culture, magic – he did not believe in any of those things, and felt no sense of the sanctity of life. Severus wasn't a sentimental man. He didn't bleed love and rainbows and puppies out the arse like Dumbledore had, but each and every life was unique.
He saw that, at least. Did that mean he would hesitate to kill? No. But he killed out of pragmatism, not out of bloodlust or ideology. One killed, or was killed. That is how the Death Eaters had worked, during the Rise. It was how they had worked during the Return, although now that was changing, slowly.
Severus knew the steps of his dance perfectly. He knew how to please the Dark Lord and protect the children of Hogwarts. He knew which information should be passed on to the Order, and he knew which information should not be. He had even prepared for the return of Potter, and felt lucky he had the presence of mind to force the boy to take his memories.
But he hadn't quite prepared for the way in which Potter would make his return, not with the entire cohort of missing Unspeakables and raids all across Britain. The steps of Severus's dance had been irrevocably altered by Potter and the Unspeakables, and he wasn't sure how to compensate for that.
The Dark Lord had been furious. He had swollen with an anger and fury Severus hadn't seen in over a decade, and not even his Lady Wife could soothe him – because she had been damaged by a rune-trap of some kind, something which Severus had never seen before.
It appeared likely the Dark Lord hadn't seen it before either, since he hadn't yet been able to repair the damage to the Dark Lady. Although Severus didn't think she would need the help – he had never seen Valmira take a wound from which she didn't heal, and she had taken many wounds and curses. A corrupted kind of fertility magic was assumed to be the reason for this, although Severus had never enquired directly.
That would be too dangerous.
With nothing else to do, Severus had taken to stalking the battlements angrily, waiting for a summons from the Dark Lord. He could not leave Hogwarts because the Dark Lord would almost certainly require him at some point soon; how soon was soon?
He'd thought more than once that Potter and the others were never going to come back. He wouldn't have blamed them if they hadn't. With each passing year he thought it unlikely to occur, and wondered whether they had killed Potter – and then they hadn't.
But near enough a decade was a long time to wait, a very long time. Did they understand the world which they left behind? It had moved on, progressed, changed. Arguably for the worse, but then… aspects had improved. That had been the method used by the regime, of course. Some changes would be distasteful at first, but in the end, they would be passed through because they included within them things which most wizards, even those not sympathetic to Pureblood ideology, wanted.
It had been a slow, creeping change. A directed change. The Dark Lady had changed the way the Dark Lord thought. Severus saw it in his every action, in the plans they made, and in the changes to his ideology. His Rise was not the same as the First War, and the War for Pureblood Freedom not the same as either. His reign had been different still.
Breeding camps hadn't been considered during the First War. Not once. It had been an abhorrent idea, since children born of rape would usually be Squibs regardless of any other factors. But the Dark Lady had been insistent, and had overseen the programme… and it had worked.
Hecate's frozen tits, it had worked. Death Eaters were given mudblood concubines, at first. Then it progressed to forced marriages between unmarried mudbloods. Then the new communities had developed. Magical birth rates were increasing year on year, although that had stalled somewhat in recent days.
And yet the Dark Lord still didn't feel as if his work was done. Severus saw that, too. He worked on projects constantly, hypotheses and theories on esoteric and obscure magical phenomena. Severus understood all that, saw how they fitted into his dance.
But he didn't know what they were. He didn't know how to adapt to the emergent force of the Unspeakables, for surely they would only grow in significance. He hoped so, at least, because they shouldn't have come back unless they were prepared to make important choices.
His Dark Mark flared into searing pain, and he knew the Dark Lord required him. He descended from the battlements quickly, returning to the interior of the castle, and moved at once to Voldemort's location in his personal library.
Severus Snape feared the Dark Lord, but he was perhaps the only person alive who did not fear the Dark Lord's Legilimency. Master Legilimens though he was – perhaps the best in the world – the Dark Lord was no match for Severus Snape's tightly honed Occlumency.
Severus was the premier Occlumens in the world, not that anyone really knew that. It would be useless if they did. The Dark Lord looked no further than his third layer of Occlumency constructs and mindscapes, which he believed to be the inner mass of Severus Snape's mind.
Nine more layers of constructs waited behind that, should the Dark Lord ever penetrate his shields.
"My Lord," he said, and dropped to one knee. The Dark Lord required obeisance from his followers even when they would see multiple times over the course of a normal day. It was a tiring charade, but one Severus had to put up with.
"Rise, Severus," he said, and so Severus rose.
"We knew that the Potter boy would show up again," said the Dark Lord. "We did not kill him as we claimed, after all. This is not a defeat as such. Nonetheless, we must distract from it. Lucius is at Wizengamot as we speak stirring support for the Irish War, and we shall pass through some effective legislation by the end of it."
Nothing pleased the Dark Lord more than effective legislation. He had delighted in twisting and coiling the laws of Britain around himself, corrupting them, and using them to his own ends. He had received a dispensation for use of 'Most Extreme and Dark magic'. He had used them to institute himself as Imperator Maximus, the highest authority in Wizarding Britain. He'd essentially invoked ancient Roman authority, something which magical Britain was in theory still beholden to in some ways (though, Severus thought that bond rather weaker than the one tying them to the Muggle Queen, and nobody ever talked about that).
Severus thought that the pleasure came more from the fact that the wizards of Britain were doing his work for him than any great love of institution. Much Ministry law was diktat, but much of it had been created by Wizengamot and voting. The British public – or their representatives in Wizengamot, which wasn't even halfway democratic – kept designing laws which would make their Lord happy, and happy he became indeed.
"We will be attacking Ireland tonight, I should think. There is a wizarding town just on the Muggle border, where they have partitioned the island," said the Dark Lord. Severus knew which one he was talking about – during the First War fighting there had been masked as Muggle terrorism, although there had actually been a high degree of Muggle terrorism going on at the time.
Death Eaters had been shot by Muggle guns.
"I know the location, my Lord. Shall I be in attendance?"
Severus didn't often have to go out on raids. His position of Headmaster forbade it, although one never left the Death Eater hierarchy. Despite its refashioning as an intelligence agency cum army, the Inner Circle of Death Eaters still advised the Dark Lord directly, and performed 'errands' and 'tasks' for him.
Rarely did those involve domestic suppression or raiding, because that was Auror work – or Death Eater rank-and-file training.
"I desire it."
Severus hadn't truly expected that. It would be… necessary, he supposed.
"Of course, my Lord."
"You will conceal your identity. It would not do for the Headmaster of Hogwarts to be involved in an attack on Irish soil, war or no war," said the Dark Lord. All traces of his former anger had disappeared; Severus wondered why.
"As you wish, my Lord."
"Lucius will be present also. The Inner Circle will participate in this task fully," he said. "You have forgotten what it means to be a Death Eater, I should think, these past years."
"As you say, my Lord."
It was true enough, he supposed. Adaptation had been difficult at first – the Dark Lord had won and secured the freedom of and for Purebloods everywhere in Britain. The struggle was over.
Or so the thought had been, but then the Purebloods had realised – or, would come to realise in time, for those who hadn't – that the Dark Lord cared largely for himself and his own goals. Often those aligned with the goals of Dark Purebloods in particular, but often they didn't.
Some had grown increasingly lazy and disobedient. Such was the way of things. But for all of them to be required to participate in battle… that was a punishment, certainly. A reminder, also.
Dark happenings would go on that night, Severus was sure. These Death Eaters revelled in forbidden, dangerous, and Dark magic. These Death Eaters had carried out the Children's Massacre, the Rape of Bristol, and many more atrocities besides.
All in the name of 'Pureblood freedom'.
Ireland would see that as it never had, during the First War.
Severus could only hope its people were ready.